Welcome to Medical News Today

Healthline Media, Inc. would like to process and share personal data (e.g., mobile ad id) and data about your use of our site (e.g., content interests) with our third party partners (see a current list) using cookies and similar automatic collection tools in order to a) personalize content and/or offers on our site or other sites, b) communicate with you upon request, and/or c) for additional reasons upon notice and, when applicable, with your consent.

Healthline Media, Inc. is based in and operates this site from the United States. Any data you provide will be primarily stored and processed in the United States, pursuant to the laws of the United States, which may provide lesser privacy protections than European Economic Area countries.

By clicking “accept” below, you acknowledge and grant your consent for these activities unless and until you withdraw your consent using our rights request form. Learn more in our Privacy Policy.

Please accept our privacy terms

We use cookies and similar technologies to improve your browsing experience, personalize content and offers, show targeted ads, analyze traffic, and better understand you. We may share your information with third-party partners for marketing purposes. To learn more and make choices about data use, visit our Advertising Policy and Privacy Policy. By clicking “Accept and Continue” below, (1) you consent to these activities unless and until you withdraw your consent using our rights request form, and (2) you consent to allow your data to be transferred, processed, and stored in the United States.

The approach may lead to "off-the-shelf" stocks of cancer-killing cells, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

In a paper now published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the authors describe how the cells showed enhanced "anti-tumor activity" in mice with ovarian cancer seeded from human cancer cells.

The immunotherapy is a type known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy. It increases immune cells' cancer-killing power by reprogramming them to express CAR protein, which has been engineered to bind only to cancer cells.

Advantages of natural killer cells

Typically, CAR immunotherapy uses genetically altered white blood cells known as T cells that are grown from cells taken from patients. This approach is called CAR-T cell immunotherapy and has been the focus of much research and funding lately.

"NK cells," explains senior study author Dan S. Kaufman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, "offer significant advantages as they don't have to be matched to a specific patient."

Because, he adds, "one batch of iPSC-derived NK cells can be potentially used to treat thousands of patients," it opens the prospect of "standardized, 'off-the-shelf' treatments" for use with other anticancer drugs.

CAR-T cell obstacles

CAR-T cell immunotherapy has shown great promise but positive results from trials have not always translated to clinical success.

Prof. Kaufman and team describe several obstacles. First is the fact that CAR-T cell therapy needs T cells taken from the patient and only works for that patient.

This is time-consuming as it involves extracting the cells, engineering them, and then expanding their number in the laboratory before infusing them back into the patient.

In addition, not all patients that might benefit from CAR-T cell therapy are in a position to give the cells. Also, their cancer could be progressing so fast that by the time the engineered cells are ready, the window of opportunity has closed.

Safety concerns

There have also been increasing concerns about the safety of CAR-T therapy. In fact, Prof. Kaufman notes that there have been some cases of "severe toxicity or adverse effects" that have led to organ failure and death.

He and his colleagues have already conducted some research into NK cells that suggested that they do not produce the same adverse side effects. They also found that they produced "few adverse effects" in the mouse models they used in the new study.

2018 Healthline Media UK Ltd. All rights reserved. MNT is the registered trade mark of Healthline Media. Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a healthcare professional.